I'm telling you, the Gov has no business promising NIU money that rightly should be paying teaching salaries right now._____

While I'm not interested in going to see Avatar, I would love to see this place, which apparently inspired some of the settings in the film, in person. Stunning indeed!_____

The Daily Douche Bag:

How much do you want to bet that being named Telly Savalas Virgin had something to do with this guy turning out to be a douche bag? (The parents who named him that are douche bags, too. That's just mean.)_____

If you start smoking at a party, I can absolutely guarantee that within five minutes everyone else will be smoking too. And what makes this even worse than being made to stand outside is that they will be smoking yours.

Since the smoking ban, no one has given up the tabs. They’ve just given up buying them, and this is the most annoying thing in all of human history.

Yep.

I would give someone a kidney or a pint of blood. But my last cigarette? No. I’m afraid not.

Last weekend I took a crisp, unopened packet of 20 to a friend’s house, where I’d been invited to spend the day shooting. And over breakfast one of the chaps said: “Ooh, can I nick one of those?”

Naturally this prompted his wife to chime in with a request as well, and that sort of opened the floodgates. So, by the time we’d pulled our boots on and set off, I had only 10 left. Ten wouldn’t be enough. When a smoker has only 10 fags in his pocket and there’s no shop for miles, it’s an all-consuming problem. You do a lot of maths. When can I get to a shop? How many hours till then? And just when you’ve worked out you can have one only every 40 minutes, the hordes descend again: “I say, you haven’t got another fag, have you?” So now you have only five.

I don't know about where you live, but in Chicago cigarettes run somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 per pack, so, on top of the irritation factor, there's the small matter of the not insubstantial cost of funding the damned moochers' habits.

And people -- total strangers and pan handlers, especially -- get really testy if you actually tell them no, even if they offer to pay you for one.

Do yourself a favor: If you want a cigarette, go buy your own pack. If you don't want one badly enough to do that, then don't try to mooch one from anyone else._____

Just heard about this upcoming Chicago singer, Daphne Willis, and I'll be buying her debut CD when it comes out:

People mooching cigarettes were one of the reasons I smoked Camels. They'd ask to bum one, you'd pull out the pack of unfiltered cigs and usually they'd blanch and go find someone else to mooch off of.